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The Resurrection of a Renegade’s Scotch-Tape Films

IT had its premiere in the sort of squalid splendor in which it had been filmed: an old apartment house at Second Avenue and 10th Street in the East Village that a black-clothed artist had transformed into a cavern for unpredictable 16-millimeter projection. This was the Gate Theater, created by Stephen P. Pokart and Stephen Wangh, where in January 1967 a young writer-director named Robert Downey witnessed the opening of his $25,000 comedy, “Chafed Elbows.” Half of the time, the film’s images of bohemian misadventure did not even move, having been pieced together from still photos developed at a drugstore, and all of the female characters were played by the filmmaker’s wife, Elsie Downey, a one-woman commedia troupe.

From these humble origins “Chafed Elbows” rose to become a breakout hit for New York’s underground cinema. Rapidly acquiring a reputation as one of the most rudely hilarious films ever made, it enjoyed marathon runs at the Gate and the Bleecker Street Cinema (where it played for months with Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising”) and brought its startled author his first fame. Mr. Downey proceeded to a career of highs (“Putney Swope,” 1969) and lows, while “Chafed Elbows” went on to oblivion. After the film’s heyday its negative disappeared, existing prints turned into vermicelli, and screenings faded to hazy memories.

Now Anthology Film Archives in the East Village has rescued and preserved “Chafed Elbows” and two more of Mr. Downey’s riotous but equally endangered early works, “Babo 73” (1964) and “No More Excuses” (1968), with the support of the Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation. These time capsules of another era — which like capsules of a different kind can act quickly on the nervous system — will be shown at Anthology in a weeklong series beginning Sept. 12, along with one of Mr. Downey’s most personal films, the never-released “Moment to Moment” (1975).

“Robert Downey is one of the troubadours of our time,” said Jonas Mekas, founder of Anthology and godfather of the ’60s underground, when asked recently about these films. “People like him are here to laugh and insult, and their heads may roll off. That’s their privilege. And we believe it’s our duty to share with those who came after.”

But what does today’s troubadour think? (The title is a demotion. Mr. Downey used to credit himself as “a prince.”) Visited recently in his decidedly unsqualid home overlooking the East River — an apartment he shares with his wife, Rosemary Rogers — he proves to be white-haired at 72 but also tall, unstooped and busy with new projects, including a documentary about Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weill. When the conversation turns to the preservation effort, he seems touched but also astonished that someone has “brought those films back from the dead.”

Photo

Chafed Elbows, with George Morgan and Elsie Downey.Credit
Courtesy of Robert Downey & Anthology Film Archives

“What I was amazed by, when I saw the lab work,” he said, “was that the young people in the lab were laughing at the stuff. I remembered some laughter back then, but not like this.”

“When it was running, I used to go see the guy who ran the Bleecker Street, Marshall Lewis, in his office,” Mr. Downey rejoined, “and to get there you walked behind the screen. You could look out and see the audience. They’d be staring into space, sleeping, talking to each other. I said, ‘What am I, kidding myself?’ ”

If he was deluded, so were some of the period’s best critics.

In The New Yorker, Brendan Gill greeted “Babo 73” as “the funniest movie I’ve seen in months,” even though it appeared to have been photographed “on Scotch tape.” Released in the midst of the Lyndon B. Johnson-Barry Goldwater campaign, the film envisioned a future in which no policy decisions could be made, since the president would be sandwiched between quarreling right-ear and left-ear advisers and his excitable chief of staff would be taking phone calls from God. After Mr. Gill had enjoyed watching the film’s president — the solemnly elfin Taylor Mead — meander into the real White House, then retire to Jones Beach for more browbeating from his cabinet, he helped secure a Guggenheim fellowship for Mr. Downey.

That support helped Mr. Downey make “Chafed Elbows,” the suitably disjointed account by a young man (George Morgan) of his “annual nervous breakdown.” A tale of incest, birth, death, rebirth, low-rent artistic pretensions and a God who is an infuriated Red Guard, “Chafed Elbows” became “virtually the first underground movie to receive favorable reviews from New York’s daily critics,” J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in their history of “Midnight Movies.” Even Bosley Crowther, in a generally disapproving notice in The New York Times, admitted that it showed a “promising modicum of lively, acid wit.”

Yet the filmmaker himself was dissatisfied, as suggested by the title of his next work, “No More Excuses.” Mr. Downey assembled this picture from unrelated sources, including slapstick images of himself dressed as a Civil War soldier, lost in present-day New York; interviews he had shot on assignment for ABC News for a report about singles bars; a mock rape scene (to which the years have not been kind); and a burlesque re-creation of the assassination of President James A. Garfield. The latter element was particularly sensitive, given that the film opened in May 1968. But Vincent Canby, reviewing “No More Excuses” for The Times, declared it to be “technically disciplined, emotionally chaotic and about as susceptible to positive criticism as a spider’s web is to reweaving by a Bond Street tailor.”

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Robert Downey, left, created some notorious underground films in the 1960s.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Martin Scorsese, who is on the board of the Film Foundation, asked, “How could we even think of not preserving these films?” Interviewed by e-mail, he described the pictures as “an essential part of that moment when a truly independent American cinema was born.”

“They’re alive in ways that few movies can claim to be, because it’s the excitement of possibility and discovery that brought them to life,” Mr. Scorsese said.

In Mr. Downey’s account, that discovery began on Avenue B at the Charles Theater, where in 1962 he showed his first reel of film — the Civil War scenes that later went into “No More Excuses” — at an open screening. “If you could get the film to the booth, it got shown,” he recalled. “Elsie and I worked as custodians at the Charles, cleaning the place, just to be a part of it.”

And it was at the Charles that Mr. Downey saw Ron Rice’s “Flower Thief,” starring Mr. Mead, which prompted him to say, “Oh, wow, you really can make a movie with just friends and a camera.” Soon he had the basics. “A friend of mine — we worked at the Village Gate as waiters — he said: ‘Are you still writing stuff? I know where we can get a camera.’ ”

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No More Excuses, right, with Paula Morris.Credit
Courtesy of Robert Downey & Anthology Film Archives

The apparatus turned out to be spring-wound, so the takes could last no longer than 16 seconds, and the film stock was hundred-foot spools of Air Force surplus, salvaged from a dump behind an air base. (Film history can now account for the energetic montage and Scotch tape cinematography of “Babo 73.”) Postproduction was equally thrifty. “This friend of mine, Fred von Bernewitz, worked as an editor, so we’d sneak into movie editing rooms on the weekend and later send ’em some money.”

It becomes evident that Mr. Downey begins most stories with the words, “This guy, a friend of mine.” Does that mean he felt he was part of a community? “Somewhat,” he said, then added: “There were possibilities. People back then were saying, ‘Let’s try this.’ It wasn’t a career. It was just fun.”

But if this spontaneity gave the films life, as Mr. Scorsese said, then it also came close to killing them. Asked about the materials needed for preservation, Mr. Downey said: “These things wandered. The labs would go out of business and throw out the negatives. I couldn’t find half the stuff. But we tracked them down. Andrew” — Andrew Lampert, the archivist of Anthology Film Archives — “and his team, they’re unbelievable.”

Mr. Lampert, who was 10 years shy of being born when “Chafed Elbows” opened, agreed that the preservation job was “Frankensteinian.” “Chafed Elbows,” he said, had to be pieced together from four different prints. For “No More Excuses,” the situation was even more dire: nothing was left except a single projection print, which fortunately was not too battered. The exception in the Anthology series is the nonnarrative “Moment to Moment,” a film of fragments, which Mr. Downey admitted with a sigh was his farewell to Elsie upon their divorce. He has managed to hold onto it over the years, and he notes, with evident pride, that it’s the favorite of his son, the actor Robert Downey Jr.

Asked for his own impressions of these films and the period they capture, Mr. Lampert, 31, hesitated, then said: “I recently watched ‘Easy Rider’ and felt embarrassed for an entire generation. I would hope that life in the ’60s was much more like ‘Chafed Elbows.’ ”

And Mr. Downey’s judgment on the films? “They’re uneven,” he conceded. “But I was uneven. So what? Now I’m so happy with ’em, I might even show up.”

Correction: September 7, 2008

An article last Sunday about the Robert Downey films being screened at the Anthology Film Archives misstated the date that the series is to start. It begins on Friday, not on Sept. 18.

Correction: September 28, 2008

An article on Aug. 31 about the filmmaker Robert Downey may have left the incorrect impression that Mr. Downey was the “black-clothed artist” who transformed the apartment building at Second Avenue and 10th Street in the East Village into the Gate theater. The theater was created by Stephen P. Pokart and Stephen Wangh, not by Mr. Downey.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR9 of the New York edition with the headline: The Resurrection Of a Renegade’s Scotch-Tape Films. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe